Mix Tape Assignment
Assignment: Your job is to create two copies of two mix tapes. The first mix tape should include a variety of songs for someone in our class. The music should be thematically connected, it should have additional criteria (of your own choosing), and the personalities of both yourself and the person who the mix tape is intended for (you would base the second on speculation) will need to be considered when making the mix tape. This mix tape will need to be both front and back and should pay attention to timing and sequence, among other things. The second mix tape will actually be a mix CD. Create this one according to the same requirements, but it will be for an unknown person in class. When you receive your mix tape and your mix CD in class from other students, analyze their creations based on the following questions:
1. What differences are there between creating a mix tape and a Mix CD? How are these differences determined by the technology itself?
2. To what degree does the mix tape rely on arrangement, theme, tone, mood, etc.? In other words is it a rhetorical document?
3. What (do you think) you can tell about the person who made the mix tape? What did he / she assume about you? Was it true?
In order to help present on this assignment, I would use McKee’s essay on how music fits into a larger swath of modes to create rhetorical documents. I would, most likely, focus on her excellent summary of Aaron Copeland’s book on page 344. On that page she divides “listening to music” into three catagories: the sensuous pane, expressive plane, and the sheerly musical plane” (344). Using these catagories could demonstrate to students that music is complicated to “read,” and that to be literatre, one needs to read it on at least three levels. One could also use McKee to demonstrate that music cannot be properly be understood without judging its context within a larger field of signification. What interests me especially about McKee is her claim that CDs essentially are the same as tapes. I would be interested in finding out what some of the differences are.
I would also use Voida’s et al. article, “Listening In” in order to show students that their daily practices are not simply a question of getting music and sharing music but have deep implications for how we think, interact, and socialize with each other. I would explain to students. This class exercise might help students wonder whether these authors are right when the claim that “our study of iTunes groups with with disparate musical taste can form strong group identities. The iTunes subnet groups became iTunes communities, highly attuned to the coming and going of others and impacted by the loss of community members (200).” Will bonds merge between students? Will students begin making additional mix tapes? – Vieregge
